Tuesday, July 19, 2011

GENIVI Developer Conference India 2011



2 day conference hosted at Hotel Taj and it witnessed some amazing participation from Tier 1 & Tier 2 companies. Was a great opportunity to listen to GENIVI board members talk, network with automotive players & hear about the roadmap & challenges from automakers.

My notes from the sessions:
GENIVI forum was established intending to drive innovation in Automotive infotainment system & to bring together Silicon guys to work with software providers to improve the deliverables.
Automotive was one industry which never worked in collaboration and GENIVI (G) wanted to break this trend. G is where they decide where to collaborate & where to compete. It addresses the common component that goes into making an automotive infotainment IVI system.

70% of the code which gets into GENIVI is generally Open Source. So its very important for the contributor to know the source of the source.

Automakers cost structure goes like: 10% in hardware, 40% BSP (Base porting), 40% Software Integration & validation, 10% building UI & UX
G takes care of what needs to go into an automotive platform. It’s completely based on Linux & currently supports Meego & Ubuntu. Its main intention is to develop components which are reusable. It has around 121 members & 24 new members in the pipeline.

Biggest issue currently is that we don’t have any GENIVI products, solution or prototype, however BMW promises to get its first GENIVI based IVI system out in 2013.GENIVI deliverables are:
- Specifications
- Reference base line
- Patches for projects
- GENIVI projects

G has technical experts in domains: Automotive, Consumer Electronics, Location Based Services, Media, Networking, and System Infrastructure. Currently it supports only Meego, Ubuntu and with no support from Google, Android has not been a part of the reference platform at GENIVI.

GENIVI Tools: Blog, Wiki, Jira (Action Item tracking), OBS (Open building system & code scanning tools) also have an option to use free tools – Fossology & back duck
GENIVI base code is currently not open but sooner or later will be Open Sourced under some license.

G Compliance process: Automaker submits the POC -> verification -> true functional verification -> Certificate authentication. So far G has no compliance logo designed.
Things that were lacking in G are Quality, security, testing, validation compliance standards

Show stoppers we see, in India contributing towards G: Lack of Expert groups in India, diversification interest in the consumer towards infotainment, lack of POC to prove G can make automaker’s life easy, help in driving innovation & delivering products on time.

Set of questions which GENIVI need to answer to make it a successful community:
- What’s the benefit for the end user
- How can the platform be developed to look Hack proof
- Motivate companies in being a part of the forum and how can existing members bring in more contribution

For me GENIVI looks very promising & if all it done as planned Automotive Industry will soon see Innovation wave.

2 comments:

Rahul Sharma said...

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Praful Agarwal said...

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